Wanderlust: Genshin Impact One-Shots

Eidolism: Childe x Reader

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Eɪᴅᴏʟɪsᴍ (ɴ.) Tʜᴇ ʙᴇʟɪᴇғ ɪɴ ɢʜᴏsᴛs ᴀɴᴅ sᴘɪʀɪᴛs.
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A modern AU in which Childe and a girl traverse a haunted house.

The house was built, and people had been dying in it ever since. That was how the story went, how it had gone for the last century or so. It was old, creaky, and the longer it stood, the more human-like it seemed: its front was a face, its rooms pockets, its dusty, cobweb-filled attic the brain. It didn't help that it was a block away from the cemetery.

It wasn't really haunted. It was just that since it had been built all those years ago, the house had changed owners no less than twenty-three times. And whether the consecutive owners had simply moved or died in the house (as many were wont to believe), it didn't matter. Nobody lived there now. The lawn never grew, it needed a new coat of paint in the worst way, and kids had a habit of holding their breath as they passed by.

It was the kind of house you scared newcomers to the town with. It was a rite of passage among middle schoolers to run up and knock three times on the battered door and run away before a ghost caught you. A few even claimed to see a woman's face in the window.

When the last owner died about a decade ago, he hadn't left the deed in the will, so it became the property of the town. But as long as the house looked creepy and had a rickety porch, that was good enough for everyone else. That was all it took for everyone to whisper about how haunted it was, and they generally avoided it accordingly.

Your town held its annual Halloween harvest fair in the field adjacent to the old rickety house--Reaper's Taint, as it had been so lovingly dubbed--and though it was a night of fun rides, rigged carnival games, and costumes, some lame, some not, it was also the night where people your age felt the need to do something particularly stupid.

What better night to carry out dumb ideas than Halloween? Childe, however, had been meaning to get a head start.

"Not doing it."

"It'll be fun!"

"You say that every time you ask me to do something that's the opposite of fun."

"It's just one time," Childe cajoled.

"That's one time too many." You didn't look up from your math homework as you shot him down again.

"It is a costume contest not the end of the world. I'm gonna do it."

"It's dumb."

Childe sat back, rolling his eyes up to the ceiling, and heaved a very drawn-out sigh. "Scaredey-cat."

"I am not!"

"Coward."

"Oh, shut up." You finally looked up from your homework to glare at Childe. He grinned. "You've been hounding after me to enter that contest for the last week. My answer is no. I don't even have a costume yet."

Childe clicked his tongue and shook his head. "No costume, wow, you're a slacker."

"Some silence please? I'm trying to focus." You bent over your homework again, wishing that finding the vertex of a graph wasn't so freakishly hard.

Childe placed his hand over your line of equations. "Math can wait. Halloween is in two weeks."

"Math can't wait. This is due tomorrow. I thought that was why you invited me over to your house. You know. To do homework." You shoved him off your notebook.